Macro Meat

Fair warning: This post contains links to deeply disgusting images. That’s what Mike Adams, the “Health Ranger” and editor of NewsTarget, an online health and nutrition publication, was after when he took extreme closeups of common processed meats. This type of macro photography is usually trained on flowers or insects—you know, nature. Not Jimmy Dean sausage.

Adams obviously wants to turn people away from industrially produced, processed meat, and it’d be hard to pick up a package of Oscar Mayer Cotto Salami after seeing this “huge black chunk of something.” This is macro agitprop—but like agitprop generally, it isn’t playing fair. After all, it seems likely that there’s something about Oscar Mayer Smokies that I’d find repulsive. But a repulsive photograph of a Smokie isn’t it: That just tells me that stupid people shouldn’t be allowed to have really powerful zoom lenses.

“Under magnification, tofu would probably look just as bad,” someone says in a discussion of the photos over at Jane and Michael Stern’s RoadFood.com forum. I’m not sure about that—I think tofu would just look really, really off-white—but I am sure about this: “Me thinks this man is a loopy vegan type who flat doesn’t understand the wonderful world of meat. If he did, he’d know that those fat globs in the Jimmy [D]ean sausage wouldn’t be there after it was fried up.”